Virtually every Western U.S. utility has or is in the process of developing a comprehensive wildfire strategy. A key element of any strategy is identifying the fire risk zones associated with utility infrastructure, generally overhead T&D facilities. While there are no published standards for determining utility wildfire risk, there are a number of examples with the most notables coming from the large, California IOUs. Avista (Spokane, WA) has leveraged its ESRI GIS system to create a spatial risk map (static) and another that combines inherent system conditions with the 7-day weather forecast (dynamic). All of the data is either generated by the utility or publicly available. This approach yields high quality risk scores at very low cost. A practical solution to a very complex problem.

During this webinar we will discuss:

• Leveraging ESRI-GIS systems to produce wildfire risk analysis
• Incorporating Weather data, for free
• A practical guide to the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)